Rethinking remediation

Also on Community College Spotlight: North Carolina will let community colleges bar “threatening” students, but identifying who’s dangerous and figuring out what to about it are huge challenges for college staffers.

Comments

I like the idea of adult ed; send the kids who don’t have HS grad knowledge and skills back to the schools who “graduated” them. Dumping the problem onto CCs allows k-12 systems to avoid responsibility.

I don’t see the clear, useful distinction between adult education and community college. Where I live, we have a substantial overlap between the missions of adult ed and community college, at least judging by the courses taught. It’s not obvious why adult ed would be a better place for an adult to learn algebra than community college.

A community college can say, we don’t remediate, or we don’t remediate below a certain level. But community colleges which throw out students who are too underprepared are not solving the problem. Rather, they’re making someone else handle it. Either way, the taxpayers will have to pay, so unless adult ed is cheaper (for the taxpayers) than community college, relocating problems is not the same as dealing with problems.